by John Creasey
“Oh, it’d be easy, but I won’t give them the slip,” Barbara sneered.
Her mother went out …
Charlie Wray was not only eager to take the beautiful Barbara out, but he was in funds. Nothing but the best seats were good enough for Barbara. The police were promptly told. Two went ahead and two walked behind Barbara and her Charlie, who acquired a remarkable self-importance. He was a burly young man, personable enough, with a square chin and eyes which were ready to look the world in the face. As the procession went on, he felt as if he were doing exactly that. From the front doors of the houses in the street, from houses in streets round and about, from ground-floor, first-floor, and top-floor windows, people stared at Barbara. They stared with almost as much curiosity at the young man escorting her out on her first venture since the Globe had paid £250 for her “Story of My Terror.”
Perhaps because the ponderous progress of the police put her off, perhaps because the crowd near the picture palace in the High Street was becoming a mob, Mrs. Kelworthy did not go to the pictures. So, the police did not follow her. They had a man at the front door of the house and another at the back, and they knew that Mrs. Kelworthy was having one or two at the Red Lion, a pub on a friendly corner.
When she came out again, as dusk gathered, she was with a slim, middle-aged woman in a neat grey suit, stout shoes, and, unexpectedly, a veil with a lot of little black blobs on it. No one was surprised or troubled. The constable at the front door did his duty, by greeting Mrs. Kelworthy with an amiable smile, and, “This lady a friend of yours, ma’am?”
“Friend of mine,” echoed Mrs. Kelworthy, roundly. “I should think she is. And what’s more, she’s a friend of my husband’s, too.”
The constable grinned, knowing Sailor Kelworthy. The woman smiled behind her black-blobbed veil. The door of the little house closed upon the pair. Mrs. Kelworthy promptly put on a kettle and then showed ‘her husband’s friend’ over the house; she was a little confused, and probably could not have told anyone on oath whether she had met the other woman previously.
It had not in fact been a chance acquaintance at the Red Lion that night.
Mrs. Kelworthy was very proud of her Barbara. The small parlour and the girl’s bedroom were smothered with her photographs and photographs of gatherings where she had competed.
The ‘friend’ was greatly impressed.
Then a bubbling sound attracted their attention, and Mrs. Kelworthy rushed down the narrow stairs, to discover that the kettle was boiling. Her loud laughter sounded through the house, and she took the trouble to come to the foot of the stairs and shout up, “It’s all right, dear, only the kettle. You ’ave a good look!”
“I won’t be long,” called the ‘friend’. “Down in two ticks.”
The constable outside the front door heard all this. Nothing could have sounded more innocuous. He heard footsteps, too, and now and again Mrs. Kelworthy’s laughter. He wasn’t surprised that she had had one or two more than she could stand, at the Lion. She had been under a great strain, and had taken it remarkably well.
The night was quiet.
The night was broken, a little before eleven, by an unfamiliar rumbling and muttering and clattering. At least two hundred people followed Barbara and Charlie home. They jammed the narrow street – in fact, there was hardly room for the little, veiled middle-aged woman to squeeze through and get away, although she managed to with remarkable agility and some vigour.
The police closed the door.
The general feeling was that now that the ice was broken, Barbara would be able to breathe more freely. Not a man among the police on guard dreamed that there was any danger to her that night; most would have said, quite confidently, that nothing would ever happen to her while they were at hand.
Mrs. Kelworthy went to sleep.
Barbara, with dreams of film stardom freshened, also went to sleep, happier than she had been for a long time. Charlie was quite nice, too.
She did not notice the smoke.
The room was at the top of the house, and the window overlooked the roofs of houses at the back. It was so placed that the constable on duty in an alleyway behind the house could not see it very well, and certainly he did not see the smoke which began to creep out of it, a little after three o’clock.
The flames weren’t seen for another two hours, by which time it was daylight.
Chapter Nineteen
Death By Suffocation
There was a constable at the back, getting tired and feeling chilly, and wondering whether he should smoke another cigarette in the quiet of his corner or whether he would walk to the end of the alleyway and back.
There was a red glow against the window of a house adjacent to the Kelworthys’. The constable stared at it, thinking that it looked as if someone had an electric fire on in the room – a bathroom wall fire, for instance. Then he noticed that the glow wasn’t steady.
He caught his breath.
After a moment he raced to the end of the alley and crashed open the gate of the little back garden. From there the smoke showed thick and grey against the morning sky, and he could see the flames.
His whistle shrilled.
The back door was locked and bolted. He didn’t waste time over that, but jumped on to the sill of the ground-floor window, then pulled himself up to Barbara’s room, hanging on by his fingers and clawing at the wall with his feet. Now he saw flames burning fiercely in a corner, and could feel the heat. Smoke rolled out and threatened to suffocate him, but he managed to get a foot against a drainpipe, and keep himself steady while pushing up the window.
By then, other police had arrived.
The constable opened the window wide enough to get inside the room. He almost fell. The flames were making an inferno of a corner beneath the bed. He could see the girl amid the swirling smoke – lying quite still on her side; she looked so beautiful.
He lifted her off the bed.
Other police had run a ladder up to the window.
Gasping for breath, eyes watering, hair singed and uniform scorched, the policeman got Barbara to the window, and then other police took over. The girl didn’t move. Neighbours were already at their windows, and a Globe reporter, who had a bed-sitting-room in the front of a house opposite, came staggering out, bleary-eyed, unable to believe that he had been sleeping at the vital moment.
They carried Barbara into the house next door and applied artificial respiration, while the police started to put the fire out, and the fire brigade finished the job. A scared, tearful, bleary-eyed Mrs. Kelworthy kept asking where her Barbara was, and then crying, “There’s a fire, I can smell it, something’s burning!”
It wasn’t until doctors had tried desperately to save Barbara’s life and given up all hope that her mother was told the truth. Barbara was as dead as the other four Queens, and had died by suffocation.
“That’s the end,” Turnbull growled thickly. “That’s the beginning and the end.” They were back at the Yard after a hurried visit to the Kelworthy house. “They let the killer go in and start a fire, and then make a path for her to get out through the crowd. That’s the biggest laugh I’ve heard. That ought to earn the damned coppers a George Medal.”
He was almost purple with rage.
“It’s one of the few ways it could have happened,” Roger said gruffly. “We can’t close everything up, there’s always a way through. We’ve got something we hadn’t before—this story about a woman. And we know the fire was caused by phosphorus so conditioned that it burned slowly for a couple of hours inside a roll of clothes, and then got them going. The fire chief’s report makes that certain.”
“You can’t get away from facts. They shouldn’t have let a stranger in. Goddamighty, they can’t even describe the face because of that damned veil!”
“We’ve got to take it both ways,” R
oger said. “Things go wrong nearly as often as they go right—but we usually get a break. We can’t work miracles, but—”
“Miracles, hell! Why—”
“Shut up!” Now Roger glowered. “We catch two out of three crooks, and that means we lose one out of every three. That’s the way it goes. We’re understaffed, and we always start in the dark. Get that into your head. We aren’t given a nice set of rules to learn, we can’t guess where to find the crooks, and we can’t smell them, either. Stop squawking like a conceited lout, and—”
Turnbull said harshly: “Listen, West, no one’s going to talk to me like that.” His high colour had gone, he was a creamy pallor, his eyes were glittering.
“I’ll talk to you the way I think you need,” Roger rasped.
Turnbull stood up slowly; a gigantic figure.
Roger sat where he was, at his desk, face set tightly, lips compressed. Turnbull just stood there, clenching his big hands. Two veins were beating in his neck, non-stop; and one was swelling in his temple.
This was crazy; two men in charge of the case, squabbling.
Crazy was one word.
“All right, forget it,” Roger made himself say. “We know it’s a woman or a man masquerading as a woman, which is more likely, and—”
Turnbull said through his teeth, “Now teach me my ABC. That’s if you know yours. God, you make me sick! Some times I wonder if you want to see the end of this case. How you ever put anyone inside I don’t know. You ought to be a ruddy wet-nurse to your kids, or a housemaid petting your wife. You dare talk to me as if I were—”
Roger said: “That’s enough.” He had to struggle to keep his voice steady. “We’ve a job on. When we’ve finished it we can fight if we want to.” He held his whole body stiff.
Turnbull said: “No one’s going to call me a conceited imbecile and get away with it.”
“Lout was the word,” Roger said. He wanted to get up, wanted to strike the other, nothing would have given him fiercer satisfaction than a fight. He sat where he was. “You can please yourself. We go on from where I stopped, or you get off the case.”
Turnbull was breathing through distended nostrils.
“And I don’t want to make trouble,” Roger said. “Yet.”
He fell silent again.
Turnbull’s breathing was noisy; gusty; Roger could see the struggle that the man was putting up. He waited long enough, he hoped, and then looked down at his notes and went on: “The man masquerading as a woman is much more likely. We know the clothes, the hat, and the shoes worn. There’s another thing we know now even if we didn’t before. You seen it?”
Would the explosion come now, or would it be repressed until later?
Turnbull muttered: “What?”
So it was postponed.
“The courage and cool nerve of the killer,” Roger said flatly. “It’s stop at nothing and kill at any cost. Is it just a lunatic attempt to get a favourite top of Conway’s Competition? Could there be a secondary motive to that—killing for killing’s sake, because the killer hates all beauty?”
The thought forced its way through Turnbull’s vicious mood, even changed the expression in his eyes.
He said: “… who hates beauty?”
“That’s it. The way some people love it. Regina Howard or any one of these girls would make most men lose their heads, given the time and place. See how Regina affected Osborn. Supposing we’re up against someone who’s affected the other way.”
Turnbull said slowly, heavily, “It’s conceivable, I suppose. How long have you been thinking that?”
“It’s come and gone,” Roger said. He was able to breathe more easily now; and the way out of this impasse had been to give Turnbull a new idea. “It could also be one beauty who hates all her rivals. One Queen,” he added.
Turnbull dropped into his chair, partly from nervous reaction. When he lit a cigarette, it was with a savage motion.
“You mean—one of the Queens’ hatred for the others. I—oh, hell!” He tossed the cigarette to the floor as the smell of Turkish tobacco began to creep about the room, and stamped on it savagely.
Roger said, “We’ve an outsize job on our hands, and if smoking those things helps you to concentrate, go ahead and smoke them.”
“I can manage. Well, we’re getting places. One of the Queens might be so insanely jealous of the others. Not someone who wants to see one win, but a Queen in person.”
“That’s it.”
“It’s a foul idea.”
“It’s just an idea. But remember two of them might be working this together, boy and girl. And also remember that a lot of men would lose their heads for a real beauty, would become so enslaved that whatever the lady said would be the right word. Oh, it could happen. If the woman’s a Delilah, she could possess him body and soul, she’d blind him to everything else.”
“You’re talking about—Regina.”
“And one other, remember—Norma Dearing.”
“Oh, that milky piece couldn’t make anyone’s blood race, but Regina—” Turnbull snatched out his gold case and lit another cigarette; Roger was quite sure that he didn’t realise what he was doing. “Forget it. We’re looking for a man. We’re looking for Dickerson. Forgotten him? He’s ready made.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Ready made—or put up to be knocked down.”
“If he’s dressing up as a woman it would explain why we haven’t found him, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, it could be. Only we aren’t taking anything for granted. I’m going to check on the two Queens,” Roger went on. “I’ve got to make sure that neither of them was out during the night. I’m going alone, and I want you to stay and collect reports and go over everything we’ve got to see if you can get a glimmer of anything new.”
That would be a test of the man’s mood; and strength of mind. They just sat and eyed each other, Turnbull breathing smoke through his distended nostrils.
It was almost comic.
He jumped up.
“All right,” he grunted. “Call me when you’ve put the bracelets on them.”
Roger grinned in spite of himself.
“I will. And our personal pride apart, we’re on our mettle!”
“Why?”
“Conway’s are raising merry hell. It’s costing them—”
He handed Turnbull a letter which Chatworth had received and passed on, showing how many tens of thousands of pounds Conway’s estimated they were losing.
Turnbull glowered.
“Now I’m really worried,” he sneered.
He went out, like the last blustering squall of a furious storm.
Roger groped for his cigarettes, lit one, and stared at the blue sky and the bright-green leaves and the little segment of Big Ben that he could see. He felt cold, in spite of the warmth, and he was shivery. He realised that both of them had been living on their nerves; that each jarred the other unbearably. But that flare-up had been close to real trouble, and he felt sure that it had only been postponed. Turnbull’s reaction to the Conway prod had been characteristic, but Conway’s angle was important to Conway’s and to shareholders; and the combine could make a lot of unpleasantness for the Yard.
Roger finished his cigarette, then went downstairs to Chatworth’s office. The A.C. was dictating to a secretary who wouldn’t have won a beauty prize in the wilds of Africa. But she was good; and she went out the moment she recognised Roger.
“All right, all right,” Chatworth said, “you’re doing your best. I know it. It won’t help to have the skin off the backs of the police in Wembley, either.” He tried to rumble, but couldn’t. “I take it there’s no need to ask you if you’ve seen the Globe and the rest of the newspapers.”
“The laugh’s on the Globe, I hope their man gets fired,”
Roger said. “We’re looking for Dickerson, and we simply can’t find him.”
“Sure it’s Dickerson?”
“No,” Roger said, “but everyone else seems to be, from the newspapers downward.” He looked broodingly into Chatworth’s eyes. “It’s rubbing me red raw. The first three were bad enough, but two since we’ve been aware of what’s on—”
“Listen,” said Chatworth, standing up. He looked rather like a gorilla trying to be friendly, and homespun tweeds made his paunch look mammoth. “We’ve had this kind of crime before, and unless we all get second sight we’ll have it again. But don’t let anything happen to the girls who are left.”
“I want to take them away from their homes and hide them,” Roger said. “Smuggle them away, make a big secret of it, and then let a rumour or so get out.”
“Why?”
“There are moments when I think it’s one of the girls, moments when I call myself crazy for even thinking it could be,” Roger said. “Either or both might be next on the killer’s list. Talbot’s still a possibility. Dickerson might have an accomplice we don’t even suspect. So if we hide the two Queens and let Talbot know where they are, we’ll have a clearer idea about him.”
“Using the girls as guinea pigs? I don’t know that I like it.”
“They’ll be better protected with us.”
Chatworth drew a deep breath.
“Oh, do it your way, but for Pete’s sake don’t let anything happen to them.”
“Thanks, sir,” Roger said. “Jim Fullerton’s place out at Putney Heath would be about right, and he’ll play. His wife’s away, he’s on his own this week.” He stood up. “There’s one other thing. Neither Osborn nor Talbot has alibis for each murder. They could be working together. Osborn’s act at the cottage could be to fool us. We know it wasn’t him last night, but—”
“Talking of Osborn,” Chatworth interrupted, “I’ve just had a medical report from the high-ups. He’s undoubtedly had a nervous breakdown, and will have to have a long course of treatment. The report is exhaustive, and the official opinion is that he’s unlikely to be the killer. I never quite know how much to believe of what these know-alls tell us, but apparently Osborn lost his mother when he was five, and his father two years later. The medical mumbo jumbos say that’s put the inhibition right in deep, he’s afraid of losing anyone he loves. And his love for Regina Howard is possessive and passionate. They think that’s where it stops.”
